More formidable than Mr. Terrorism
The White House has agreed that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will testify before the 9/11 Commission.
Richard Clarke is trying to play Cassandra but Newsmax quotes
an audio clip unearthed by Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity and aired on “Hannity & Colmes”.
During an interview on Detroit radio station WJR the year before the Clarke briefing, Rice mentioned bin Laden by name, then recommended: “You really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the FBI and domestic intelligence.”
Then, in a chillingly prescient comment, Rice named bin Laden a second time, warning, “There needs to be better cooperation because we don’t want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory.”
The lessons of the 9/11 commission ought to be these
- It was hard before 9/11 to get Americans to take the threat of terrorism seriously. Despite the attacks overseas, we felt safe behind our borders.
Aggresssive action has deterred further attacks
We ought to take seriously the threats of those who say they want to kill us
A further lesson comes from the Jerusalem Post. Israel has won many battles against terrorism, but has had no long term strategy for winning the war.
Do we?